Music ID3 information

[kerouack]

hello,
where boxee gets the Artist name from mp3? it seems it doesnt get the artist tag like iTunes.

thanks

[vulkan]

boxee uses the artist - id3 tag.
not sure why it conflicts with itunes.

[kerouack]

hello,
I edit id3 tags with itunes. In a lot of albums boxee read artist information different that what i have in the mp3's in itunes. It seems that reads good information associated with the album but not the same information i have in id3 tags in itunes.
This is an example:
- Two albums in itunes with Artist name "Simone Guiducci".
- In boxee i have two different artist's one is Simone Guiducci with one cd inside, another one is "Simone Guiducci Gramelot Ensemble" (yeah, thats the correct group, but thats not what i see in artist, in itunes) with another cd inside. May be boxee reads information that it is "autor" in itunes and not artist? i dont know... May be look in some place for that information like search for the art work?


- another question, do boxee reads the artwork that it is "inside" the mp3 of the album? i do that with itunes when the program can not find automatically the artwork, i put an artwork manually inside the mp3's, but it seems boxee does not use it. I would be good to use it, i have good quality artwork there, and it takes time to find it for a lot of music.


-Another about artwork, can i put manually an artwork for a musician or a record if boxee does not find it?

[vulkan]

well - boxee uses the id3 tags to retrieve info from the web. the artist that appears on boxee is the name according to the web retrieved metadata.

boxee should be able to read artwork from inside the id3 tag. however there might be some related bugs in this process so i have to look into it.

manual artwork can be used for a folder (not a track) - you simply need to create an image inside the folder - named "folder.jpg" and it should show.

-vulkan.

[kerouack]

So boxee uses the album id3 information to find the artist in the web, and use that artist in boxee.
I think, for me would be better just use the artist id3 from the mp3's, or at least give that option, why? cause i use itunes to write that information and i have it like i like.
Futhermore with jazz music and others it is something complex, i dont want to have a lot of diferents artist's for one real artist, like:
- Miles Davis quintet
- Miles davis quartet
- Miles Davis
- Miles Davis group
- Miles Davis octet
- Miles davis big band
- Miles Davis/Gil evans
- Miles Davis electric group

and 3 records in each boxee artist folder. It seems getting the artist from the web, thats what happens.
I want to have only one folder "Miles Davis" and all records in that folder. Futhermore, if someone have the album id3 tag in the mp3, why not having the artist too?
I know talking about this is a lot easier than programming it, but this is just what would be good in my opinion. Just read artist id3 and do the boxee artist folders with that, or give it like an option cause for some people can be really usefull.


Thank you.

[kine]

I agree, this would be a nice feature to add eventually. I am very particular about my tagging, and on-line services are not; it would be great to have some control over what boxee's source is for the meta-data.

[jpeeters]

It would be great if boxee would be able to use the "Album Artist" tag of iTunes, although I am not sure if this is written in the ID3 tag or only in the iTunes library. If not in the ID3 tag, boxee should allow the user to enter that same meta information (maybe by adding a web interface, this would make editing a lot less time consuming than the current interface).

[kerouack]

i think the artist it is in the id3 tag because you can see it if adding some mp3 to another library or another computer.

[jpeeters]

iTunes uses the following tags for it's Artist and Album Artist information:

TT2 (Title/songname/content description): Title
TYE (Year): 2008
PIC (Attached picture): ()[JPG, 0]: , 54838 bytes
TP2 (Band/orchestra/accompaniment): Album Artist
TAL (Album/Movie/Show title): Album
TRK (Track number/Position in set): 1/1 (Track # / Total Tracks)
TPA (Part of a set): 1/1 (Disc # / Total Discs)
TP1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Artist


You can search for their definition on http://www.id3.org/id3v2-00

[kerouack]

so could be posible read that tags in boxee to make the artist boxee information ?

[pmacgovern]

There definitely needs to be more control over the tagging of music files - including the use of the Album Artist over Artist. I have a lot of compilations, where the Album Artist is "Various Artists" and the Artist is the name of the performer. I would much rather have a single entry for Various Artists with all my compilations underneath than 200 or more entries all with one song each. This is my main beef with all music players other than iTunes; no others that I have tried have dealt with compilations well.

When the "Auto-adding" doesn't work very well - it would be nice to just be able to enter either artist or album name when looking up the correct information. I had to go online to find out I had the album name slightly wrong. This is also pretty important when trying to recognise all the 100s of "Greatest Hits" albums out there.

[rymalia]

well - boxee uses the id3 tags to retrieve info from the web. the artist that appears on boxee is the name according to the web retrieved metadata.

-vulkan.

This doesn't make sense. If the mp3 files have id3 data filled in, why would you then go to the web to figure out what the artist & album name are? I have a few instances where Boxee is coming up with an inaccurate Artist or Album, or both, but the files have accurate ID3 tagging.

What's reasoning behind trying to pull that from web metadata when it already exists in the files themselves?

[perrin21]

Why not just keep it simple and use the itunes library for artist info and song info. It makes organising and setting of album art much easier. Its also what front row does and it just works. I think music files are way too over complicated in both xbmc and boxee. Dont try and reinvent the wheel on a mac.

[perrin21]

I do all of my song organising in Itunes, it takes ages and is laborious but its all done now and i dont want to mess with it. If boxee is going to make me change it all again ill simply use something else. Not because im stubborn but because the idea of spending ££££ on a media pc was hard enough to get past my missus, i told her it would be easy to use and yet Boxee / XBMC makes a mess of this IMHO. Media central works like front row, and front row is fine for music. Boxee should be the same.

[marcel]

hi
we use the id3 tag info as reference to retrieve the covers art. we do not just use the album name and artist but also the other info as well to confirm the correct data..:)

[perrin21]

hi
we use the id3 tag info as reference to retrieve the covers art. we do not just use the album name and artist but also the other info as well to confirm we the correct data..:)

I must be doing something wrong then because i cannot search my music by album art, even though Itunes shows all of my music has art. Sometimes when i play a song i get some art but its hit and miss. I have all of my music in the same folder. Why cant homebrew media centers ever get the music part right?

It should be simple. Search by Album, Artist, Genre, Playlist. Not search by file name, date order, etc. You just end up with a complicated mess of music.

[marcel]

we are still trying to perfect this issue with album art...:)

[perrin21]

we are still trying to perfect this issue with album art...:)

Glad to know its not me lol. is there a timescale for this? For me and im sure many others out there. A media center has to do just 3 things well. Music, Photos, Videos. I think that sometimes this can be made over complicated when it doesnt have to be. OSX is very powerful already and most of this can simply be done from the finder using preview. I dont believe reinventing the wheel should be necessary.

[IOIIOOO]

I have a number of MP3s that for whatever reason Boxee has decided that they are something other than what they are tagged as, and as such is showing album art and artist info not related to what's in the ID3 tags.

Given that most people seem to be tagging their music these days for iPod compatibility, why not have Boxee do this:

* If Album, Artist, Song and Cover Art info is embedded in the MP3, use that directly.
* If any metadata is missing, use what is available to determine the song online and show that info in the library.

That way the system isn't second guessing what is already part of the MP3 file saying what the song is, who made it, etc.

[agentlame]

i personally think it would be a much better option to keep it the way it is, by default... and add a setting option to prefer id3 over last.fm.

remember, boxee is all about social... if your id3's don't match last.fm, how is boxee going to share what you're listening to?

[IOIIOOO]

i personally think it would be a much better option to keep it the way it is, by default... and add a setting option to prefer id3 over last.fm.

remember, boxee is all about social... if your id3's don't match last.fm, how is boxee going to share what you're listening to?

Sorry, I guess I disagree. I think the social aspects of Boxee are nice, but that it should first and foremost be the best media center possible, which means displaying the correct info for the songs, especially in a world where so many MP3s are sold pre-tagged now.

Besides, it could still do a match against last.fm from the ID3 tag info. Or to put it another way, what is more likely to make a good last.fm match - a match based solely on the song name, or one that is based on all of the ID3 info pre-stored in the MP3 file (name, artist, album, etc)?

[perrin21]

last FM uses itunes for scrobbling anyway and whenever i play a song on my itunes i get a growl notification from Last fm saying its been recognized. Itunes it the de-facto standard for music on a mac.

[perrin21]

Also, i understand that Boxee is ported to different platforms but it would still be advantageous for certain versions to be slightly different, otherwise progress will always be halted by the weakest platform. We have the superior operating system, it just works is a way of life for mac users :-)

[pzosa]

I have a number of MP3s that for whatever reason Boxee has decided that they are something other than what they are tagged as, and as such is showing album art and artist info not related to what's in the ID3 tags.

Given that most people seem to be tagging their music these days for iPod compatibility, why not have Boxee do this:

* If Album, Artist, Song and Cover Art info is embedded in the MP3, use that directly.
* If any metadata is missing, use what is available to determine the song online and show that info in the library.

That way the system isn't second guessing what is already part of the MP3 file saying what the song is, who made it, etc.
fwiw I am having the same difficulty...albums that have been labeled fine in iTunes are either not cataloged at all (with no apparent way to add them) or recognized as wrong albums (and can't be labeled as the correct album since it does not show up)

Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick is an example of the former
Magenta - Revolutions is an example of the latter


I love Boxee but it seems this needs some more serious work.

[pzosa]

...one more quick example...


How can I get the band "...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead" to be in the db? Boxee doesn't seem to want to scan the folder OS's tend to not allow a "." for the first character of a folder so the band folder is "_..And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead" which is not how the band is listed at last.fm...suggestions?

[agentlame]

try just:
And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

[pzosa]

Thanks...I'll try that.

My point is that I have a library of over 1900 artists and they are all cataloged nicely with accurate id3 tags in my iTunes library. It would be very useful if there was a way to have Boxee use this. It will be painful to go through and figure out which ones are not being recognized properly by Boxee/Last.fm and hand modify the folder names and id3 tags to make them work.

Please don't take this the wrong way...I absolutely LOVE Boxee! I am just looking at ways that will make it work better in my (and others by some comments in the forum) system. Please keep up the great work.

[IOIIOOO]

Please don't take this the wrong way...I absolutely LOVE Boxee! I am just looking at ways that will make it work better in my (and others by some comments in the forum) system. Please keep up the great work.

Ditto. Exactly how I feel.

[zerofx]

I have used this to organize my whole music collection and I tell you there is a lot! It took me about 20 hours of work to assign all proper tags with this software.

http://musicbrainz.org/

It is simply put amazing if you do not have ID3 tags setup properly or have old mp3's with no tagging. It will look at the digital fingerprint of the song and figure it out for you.

I then used iTunes to embed all the album art. It was a big job but well worth it!

[alextrob]

I like the boxee interface and would love to keep using it, but I don't want all this social crap (no offense) to get in the way of my media playback. I get the whole Web 2.0 social aspect of it, but for me that's not what I want a media centre to do.

Why can't boxee keep my ID3 tags how I already have them set up via iTunes? I don't want LastFM or whoever else's tags imposed on my collection.

Sorry if this sounds harsh at all - I'm really loving using boxee.

[kerouack]

hello, after all been sayed i still think boxee should have al least the option to just read the id3 mp3 tags we put in itunes and artwork.
In fact i have 120 gigas of music and i cna not use the artist or album menu in boxee because i only have may be 3 gigas in that part, it seems put the music there is really slow. I know i can use the surce menu to go to explore the music.

[ShakeBobWillis]

i personally think it would be a much better option to keep it the way it is, by default... and add a setting option to prefer id3 over last.fm.

remember, boxee is all about social... if your id3's don't match last.fm, how is boxee going to share what you're listening to?

Couldn't it just share via the id3 tag? Sure sharing is the main point of boxee, but if it doesn't functionally work well with a large library, how often is it going to be used as the mp3 player anyway? I think most of us with large libraries of music are pretty anal about tagging our files, and would probably be more accurate than some online database.

[GenNove]

Couldn't it just share via the id3 tag? Sure sharing is the main point of boxee, but if it doesn't functionally work well with a large library, how often is it going to be used as the mp3 player anyway? I think most of us with large libraries of music are pretty anal about tagging our files, and would probably be more accurate than some online database.

I agree an online database does nto care of how it looks on our library or how our folders are structured. They just tag it.

Boxee should have a diffrent approach to music organization.
As it is is a total mess. i HAVE ABOUT 800 ALBUMS and only 60 are being indexed. Yet on itunes every single album shows properly with artwork and lyrics.

[agentlame]

As it is is a total mess.

remember, boxee is in alpha... issues come with the territory.

considering how much users comment on these types of issues, i'm sure the team has it on their radar.

[DGMurdockIII]

http://www.id3.org/

[MarkF52]

I just started using Boxee and am generally really happy but the tagging thing is certainly one for the "to do" list.

I meticulously tagged all of my music and I'd rather just use my iTunes library since I spent so much time getting it exactly how I want it.

Also, sort of unrelated, but Boxee didn't index a large part of my library. I suppose it could be b/c a lot of it is live shows as opposed to stuido albums.

[perrin21]

I have noticed that Plex has started using itunes album art, i presume Boxee will follow suit soon as both are XBMC based.

[dan1son]

I just started using Boxee yesterday and have to say I much prefer it over XBMC and Plex... however the id3 tag implementation needs options/work.

I use Linux at work/home, OSX on my laptop, and I have a Windows box upstairs. All of which sync any number of music applications (songbird, banshee, amarok... I use oggs for my cds so I don't use iTunes) with a large music library stored on a Linux server at home. I have spent many hours using musicbrainz Picard software to tag and organize my id3 tags. All of my albums have correct id3 tagging so every one of these apps (or my portable devices) can simply import them and away I go.

Boxee has gotten a large number of my albums wrong even though the id3 tags perfectly match musicbrainz albums. It has renamed artists, albums, and track names in the boxee GUI or has simply not added albums. There is seemingly no method to the way boxee decides what the album is. The current search is also insufficient at finding almost all of my messed up albums. There is also no place to find what albums it simply didn't add since it couldn't find something. I am about to use Amarok to resort all of my albums into a file structure that will make it possible to use the file browser in boxee to find albums (although this is NOT what I want as I really like the album stuff in boxee for the albums it did find).

It would be great if it would read the id3 tags as they are, sort the artists/albums based on that, and then download the album art and information if it can find it. Then have a nice to use browser to find the missing albums with searching by artists alone (since the current search doesn't find a bunch of common albums I have with expected search strings).

Keep up the good work. This is a very powerful app and I can't wait until some of these issues are worked out.

[cvp]

I just wanted to add here that I have similar issues. I have a massive music library with a lot of obscure music that most auto-tagging apps have a lot of difficulty finding, and I have to spend a lot of work keeping up my tags in iTunes and other tag apps. Boxee doesn't recognize any of that and about 80% of my music library is mislabeled, ignored, or just completely messed up.

Please support better methods of recognizing music. Perhaps you could keep the same way you're doing it, but offer a "power user option" that would allow you to choose how your music is tagged by Boxee. This would keep the majority of users on the easier, more automatic option, and then allow more advanced users who have spent more time on their library the ability to get stuff imported as well.

[bpbutler]

I have to add my input on this. I really agree that if the file has artist, album, title, and track number tags, that those should take precedence over any outside source of information. Assuming the ID3 tags are wrong and overriding them really diminishes the quality of Boxee as a universal multimedia center.

As for the whole sharing idea, if my ID3 tags don't match those from lastFM or any other site, then too bad. Just assume it wasn't meant to be. What if I have music that lastFM knows nothing about? What if it's a recording of my own? Maybe some think the sharing thing is important, but I'd prefer you get it working well with local media first, then worry about sharing.

I've also noticed that it seems to have a hard time with multi-disc sets. One example is The Beatles White Album. Originally, one disc showed up as the legitimate White Album, the other one was labeled "Russian Bootleg". I changed the alleged bootleg version to the White Album. Now once you select "White Album" from the list of albums, you get two entries. Looks like a concept for grouping CDs together into a collection. That part I like. However, come to find out both CDs are treated as disc 1. Disc 2 is actually listed first, with all the track titles for disc 1, through track 13. Disc 1 has the track labels for disc 1, but the track titles are all screwed up. Track 1 should be Back in the USSR, but is actually Wild Honey Pie. All 17 tracks are from disc 1, but only track 14 is labeled correctly.

At the secondary menu, there is nothing to distinguish disc 1 vs disc 2.

Once the handling of multiple albums is fixed, it would be great if you could play all CDs in a set from start to finish, in proper order.

Another, more typical example of multi-volume problems is Genesis:The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Only one of the two discs in the set shows up. The other is simply missing. Perhaps it is one of the 18 "unresolved" items in the library. I don't think I have any multi-volume sets that are treated properly, at least not so far.

[subvertbeats]

I have to add my input on this. I really agree that if the file has artist, album, title, and track number tags, that those should take precedence over any outside source of information. Assuming the ID3 tags are wrong and overriding them really diminishes the quality of Boxee as a universal multimedia center.


I definitely support this PoV..

[agentlame]

guys... the team has said they will switch to id3, in a future build.

[drgonzo2k2]

guys... the team has said they will switch to id3, in a future build.

Hey There,

First time poster here, and let me preface this by saying I absolutely LOVE boxee, and I am very pleased with the application to-date. Any idea when this build will be released? Currently, due to this method of metadata retrieval, boxee is unseable to me.

My problem here, is that I have a very large digital music library. This is about 3600 "albums" (including box sets, etc.) for a total for about 8000 CDs.

As I have ripped this collection in slowly over time, I never really cared about the metadata until I started listening to the collection with different music players. I then quickly realized that I needed someway to make sure my collection was displayed properly across all possible players, and that's when I found out about ID3 tags. Since this was a "standard" I too made it my standard and undertook a 6 month project to make sure that proper ID3 tags, including high-res artwork (600X600 or larger) were embedded in all files.

Now my collection displays the same no matter where I play it - iTunes, WinAmp, WMP, my iPOD, even if I burn MP3s onto a CD and play them in my DVD player. The process of using the embedded tags only for the purpose of retreiving 3rd party metadata is a bad idea to me for 2 reasons:

1. For people like me who have taken care to make sure their library appears the same across all players, this is the 1 player where it doesn't, and this sucks for us pretty bad.

2. The process of adding media to your library takes WAY too long due to the lookup/retrieval of the metadata from the Internet. I have been letting boxee scan my library for about 36 hours now and it's only about 1/2 way done. Just for a test, on the same machine, I created a new iTunes library and imported the entire collection again. iTunes processed all 8000 CDs in about 2 1/2 hours. All of them appear properly, as opposed to the mess I currently have in boxee.

Again, this is a great application, especially for an ALPHA build, but it's not really usable for ME at the current status. Again, this is only my opinion, and others may find this lookup of metadata very useful. You should definitely leave it in, especially as a fallback if ID3 tags are not available.

Keep up the good work!

[agentlame]

drgonzo2k2, i agree 100%... i actually had to open boxee's database with sqlbrowser to make it stop listing 2pac as FIVE different artists.
or, listing the smashing pumpkins and the offspring as two: with/without 'the'. last.fm has some messed-up metadata.

so boxee switching to id3 should fix all of said issues.

now, this doesn't come without compromises... there is a reason the team chose last.fm/dciscsongs/allmusic over id3: boxee is a social media center... actually, that's it's primary feature. anytime boxee uses local data over internet sources, it has no real facility to share that info with your friends.

that's why this was a tough call... and even when they decided to do it, my understanding is it was quite a debate.

[ecklund]

drgonzo2k2, i agree 100%... i actually had to open boxee's database with sqlbrowser to make it stop listing 2pac as FIVE different artists.
or, listing the smashing pumpkins and the offspring as two: with/without 'the'. last.fm has some messed-up metadata.

so boxee switching to id3 should fix all of said issues.

now, this doesn't come without compromises... there is a reason the team chose last.fm/dciscsongs/allmusic over id3: boxee is a social media center... actually, that's it's primary feature. anytime boxee uses local data over internet sources, it has no real facility to share that info with your friends.

that's why this was a tough call... and even when they decided to do it, my understanding is it was quite a debate.

Maybe Boxee should use ID3 if present and then transmit that data to the "social" music services (I think coversutra does this with LastFM).

Either way, it would definitely be less frustrating to the end user. Boxee has serious issues with anything that has "Greatist Hits" in the title, and also has a propensity to get a lot of track names wrong.

:eek:

[BuhSnarf]

now, this doesn't come without compromises... there is a reason the team chose last.fm/dciscsongs/allmusic over id3: boxee is a social media center... actually, that's it's primary feature. anytime boxee uses local data over internet sources, it has no real facility to share that info with your friends.


I have to call question to this. I use Amarok which uses purely id3 tags and that integrates perfectly with last.fm. There is no reason why using id3 tags would impair using the social features. If you tell last.fm that the song is whatever the id3 tag says it is last.fm 95% of the time can match it up, even if it's spelt slightly different in it's directory.

As it is, I can't see half of my music collection. Surely that is worse than the odd one or two songs not appearing on my last.fm stream. As it is, boxee doesn't scrobble to last.fm when I listen anyway - even though I asked it to!

[agentlame]

I have to call question to this. I use Amarok which uses purely id3 tags and that integrates perfectly with last.fm. There is no reason why using id3 tags would impair using the social features. If you tell last.fm that the song is whatever the id3 tag says it is last.fm 95% of the time can match it up, even if it's spelt slightly different in it's directory.

As it is, I can't see half of my music collection. Surely that is worse than the odd one or two songs not appearing on my last.fm stream. As it is, boxee doesn't scrobble to last.fm when I listen anyway - even though I asked it to!

errr... that is a really old post.

boxee now defaults to id3.